Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [71]
Alas, governments aren’t exactly famous for cheap or simple solutions; they tend to prefer the costly-and-cumbersome route. Note that none of the earlier examples in this chapter were the brainchild of a government official. Even the polio vaccine was primarily developed by a private group, the National Foundation for Infant Paralysis. President Roosevelt personally provided the seed money—it’s interesting that even a sitting president chose the private sector for such a task—and the foundation then raised money and conducted the drug trials.
Nor was it the government that put seat belts in cars. Robert McNamara thought they would give Ford a competitive advantage. He was dead wrong. Ford had a hard time marketing the seat belt, since it seemed to remind customers that driving was inherently unsafe. This led Henry Ford II to complain to a reporter: “McNamara is selling safety but Chevrolet is selling cars.”
Some problems, meanwhile, seem beyond the reach of any solution, simple or otherwise. Think of the devastation Mother Nature regularly dishes out. By comparison, traffic fatalities seem eminently manageable.
Since 1900 more than 1.3 million people worldwide have been killed by hurricanes (or, as they are called in some places, typhoons or tropical cyclones). In the United States, the carnage has been lighter—roughly 20,000 deaths—but the financial losses have been steep, averaging more than $10 billion per year. In the space of just two recent years, 2004 and 2005, six hurricanes, including the killer Katrina, did a combined $153 billion in damages to the southeastern United States.
Why so much damage of late? More people have been moving to hurricane-prone areas (it’s nice to live near the ocean, after all), and a lot of them built expensive vacation properties (which drive up the property-damage totals). The irony is that many of these homeowners were lured to the ocean because of the scarcity of hurricanes in recent decades—and, perhaps, by the correspondingly low insurance rates.
From the mid-1960s until the mid-1990s, hurricane activity was depressed by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a long-recurring climate cycle of sixty to eighty years during which the Atlantic Ocean gradually cools and then warms up again. The temperature change isn’t drastic, just a couple of degrees. But it’s enough to discourage hurricanes during the cool years and, as we’ve seen recently, empower them during the warm.
In some regards, hurricanes wouldn’t seem to be such a hard problem to solve. Unlike other problems—cancer, for instance—their cause is well established, their location is predictable, and even their timing is known. Atlantic hurricanes generally strike between August 15 and November 15. They travel westward through “Hurricane Alley,” a horizontal stretch of ocean running from the west coast of Africa through the Caribbean and into the southeastern United States. And they are essentially heat engines, massive storms created when the topmost layer of ocean water edges above a certain temperature (80 degrees Fahrenheit, or 26.7 degrees Celsius). That’s why they start forming only toward summer’s end, after the sun has had a few months to warm up the ocean.
And yet for all their predictability, hurricanes represent a battle that humans seem to have lost. By the time a hurricane forms, there’s really no way to fight it. All you can do is run away.
But outside of Seattle lives an intellectually venturesome fellow named Nathan who believes, along with some friends, that they’ve got a good hurricane solution. Nathan has a physics background, which is key, because that means he understands the thermal properties that define a hurricane. A hurricane isn’t just a dynamo; it’s a dynamo that comes without an “off” switch. Once it’s begun amassing energy it cannot be shut down, and it’s far too powerful to be blown back out to sea with a big fan.
That’s why Nathan and his friends